Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising

by Dale L. Walker

  The day after this incident, eleven miles along their route they found an old buffalo bull wandering alone and succeeded in killing it. They were so ravenous they ate some of the meat raw, then butchered and carried the remainder to the camp, where Stuart instructed they boil some of it and drink the broth before gorging on the steaks.

  Now “somewhat recruited and refreshed,” they moved on, left the river, and traveled another fifteen miles, heading toward the foot of the Wind River Range, a bulking, unbroken wall of snowcapped mountains running toward the northwest and forcing the Astorians southward. After fording a tributary of the Green River they came upon an abandoned Indian camp strewn with buffalo bones and lying within a copse of pines. They stopped to examine it and found at its center an enormous lodge 150 feet across. The tepee-shaped structure was composed of twenty pine logs, each twelve inches in diameter and forty feet long, the whole covered with pine and willow boughs. Inside it, opposite the entrance, three bodies lay on pallets, at their heads a branch of red cedar and at their feet a large black-painted buffalo skull. From the conical ceiling were suspended “numerous ornaments” and many children’s moccasins. While Stuart gave only a clinician’s description of the sacred place, he knew its significance. The time and labor taken to assemble it, he said, gave a hint “that the personages on whose account it was constructed were not of the common order.”

  On the eighteenth, the men crossed a ridge of the Wind River Mountains, waded a branch of the Green River, and coming up from the bank encountered six Shoshonis in a hunting party who escorted them to their streamside encampment. There were four pine-branch huts in the camp and Stuart found the people “poor but hospitable in the Extreme,” and traded a pistol, an ax, a knife, a cup, two awls, and some beads for the single horse they had with them, some deerskin for moccasins and a bit of buffalo meat. The natives explained that they had been ravaged by Crow raiders who had stolen all but one of their horses and most of their food and effects and had abducted several of their women. Stuart told them that “the day was not far distant when we would take signal vengeance on the perpetrators of those deeds,” and smoked a pipe with them.

  On October 19 the seven Astorians packed their horse with enough buffalo jerky to last six days and left the Snake camp to follow the river branch southeast. They were grateful to the Indians, and justly so: They had a horse to ease their burdens, they were reasonably fit now and well fed, and even McClellan and Crooks had revived their strength and were anxious to push on. They found a beaten path, which Stuart surmised was a trail the Crow used in their forays along the river, and followed it all day. LeClairc and André Vallé, hunting ahead of the others, killed a buffalo calf toward dusk and they had a camp feast that night, with a kettle full of meat on a roaring fire as the wind whistled and snow fell around them.

  The next day they quit the Crow trace, which seemed to wind too far north for their purpose and was too dangerous in any event. Keeping to it, Irving said, “they might be described by some scouts and spies of that race of Ishmaelites, whose predatory life required them to be constantly on alert.” Instead of taking such a chance, they tramped southeast through new-fallen snow, across undulating country with the ridges of the lower Wind River Range on their front and left, and crossed a salt plain to camp in a cutting wind on another stream bank. At twilight, as they sat huddled before their fire, McClellan set out with his rifle and killed a buffalo, which they would skin and slaughter the next morning.

  * * *

  October 21, 1812, had no special significance to Stuart or his men beyond the fact that on that day they were able to cover only a paltry fifteen miles of ground in the face of a wind driving needles of snow. The expedition leader noted the snowfall and biting cold in his diary “soon after we left the drain which compelled us to encamp at the end of 15 miles ENE on the side of a Hill [which he later called “a handsome low gap”] which we must inevitably traverse where we found a sufficiency of dry Aspen for firewood, but not a drop of water.” Washington Irving, writing from Stuart’s notes and journals and presumably from interviews with Stuart, Crooks, and others of the expedition, said the seven men “set forward on their bleak and toilsome way” on the twenty-first “towards the lofty summit of a mountain, which was necessary for them to cross.”

  The camp that day was made on a hillside at the approximate latitude 42 degrees 26 minutes, not far above the line that would later establish the California-Oregon border, and the “handsome low gap” was the western entrance to a twenty-nine-mile-wide, gently sloping saddle of the Wind River Range. Stuart and his party of seven had discovered, without their slightest knowledge of it, the corridor through the Rocky Mountains that thirty years hence would enable the American settlement of Oregon and California.

  The gateway, located where the Continental Divide debouched into a wide, arid plain of sage and sand forming the eastern boundary of the Oregon Country, would come to be called South Pass (“south” because it was south of the mountain passes followed by Lewis and Clark). The Astorians’ camp lay two miles southwest of the 7,412-foot-high summit of the pass, squarely on its western terminus.

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  At daybreak on the twenty-second the Astorians ascended the pass three miles, found a spring, and made a fire beside it to cook breakfast. After five more miles they scrambled upward to a level ground strewn with pumice stones and strange shells—“evidently the production of the sea,” Stuart noted, “and which doubtless must have been deposited by the waters of the deluge.” This “top of the mountain … in the midst of the principal chain” lay at the Continental Divide, the North American backbone running from northern Alaska to Mexico and in the Rocky Mountains marking the point separating westward- and eastward-flowing rivers.

  Over the next five days winter closed on them as they descended the pass, a northeast wind harrying them as they plodded on through intermittent but blinding snowstorms, making tortuously slow progress and early bivouacs. There was little grass, and time had to be spent searching for forage for the faithful packhorse as well as for hunting for meat and wood for the campfire. Two bighorn sheep were shot and the men feasted on the “mountain mutton,” but as often they rested huddled together with no meat and no fire. They followed an eastward-bearing stream and drank from it; Stuart was convinced of its “great similarity of taste to the muddy waters of the Missouri.” They found a great supply of dried “Buffaloe dung,” which solved their campfire problem for a time, and on October 28 entered what Stuart called “a handsome Plain” with a meandering river sixty feet wide running through it. This was the river that came to be called the Sweetwater, one of the headwaters of the Platte River, which flowed in turn into the Missouri.

  Winter now barred their progress, and the need to find a place to survive it preoccupied the Astorians. They were less than 900 miles from Saint Louis, but six months would pass before they reached it.

  * * *

  They followed the Sweetwater, camping in the willows along its banks. One of their bivouacs was set up four miles east of a 128-foot-high turtle-shaped granite boulder overlooking the river. This was an unremarkable formation from their vantage point, but to the emigrants who would see it coming from the east, it would have a special significance. The boulder lay 814 miles from the Missouri frontier and came to be called Independence Rock.

  For the first time in many weeks, game and water were plentiful. Three buffalo cows were shot one morning (“the hump meat is by far the most delicious I have ever tasted,” Stuart said), and bighorns, black-tailed deer, and elk were often seen feeding at the base of the mountain or at the water’s edge.

  On November first the Astorians crossed the Platte and on a bend found a low point of land covered with willows, firs, aspens, cedars, and cottonwoods. It seemed a perfect place for winter habitation: plenty of wood for fuel and constructing a hut, game abounding, and water nearby. Stuart’s only apprehension was a visit by the “villainous and rascally Poncas.” They were a small band of Missouri Ri
ver Indians normally on friendly terms with whites but whose propensity for thievery had been witnessed by Crooks, McClellan, and the other Wilson Hunt veterans.

  With their winter site selected and their camp established, Ben Jones and the two engagés, LeClairc and Vallé, set out to hunt. In three days they had killed twelve buffalo and stored the meat in a frozen cache near the river. By the tenth, the Astorians had killed, butchered, and cached the meat of thirty-two buffalo, twenty-eight deer and bighorn sheep. After Ramsey Crooks had a dangerous encounter with a grizzly that he found whuffling in a pile of buffalo guts, Ben Jones bagged the animal and added the meat to the cache.

  When not hunting and transporting the meat and hides to the campsite, all hands worked at constructing their winter quarters, an eight-by-eighteen-foot hut six feet high made of cottonwood logs and buffalo hides with a fire pit in the middle and a hole in the roof over it, Indian style. The party now reveled in abundance. They had a snug cabin, plenty of meat, water, forage for their packhorse, and deerskins to scrape and soak and soften to replace tattered shirts, trousers, leggings, and moccasins. They “looked forward to a winter of peace and quietness,” Irving wrote in a poetical reverie:

  … a time of roasting, and boiling, and boiling, and feasting upon venison, and mountain mutton, and bear’s meat, and marrow bones, and buffalo humps, and other hunter’s dainties, and of dozing and reposing round their fire, and gossiping over past dangers and adventures, and telling long hunting stories, until spring should return; when they would make canoes of buffalo skins and float themselves down the river.

  But these dreams were rudely interrupted a few days after the hut was completed, its log walls chinked with river clay, its fire pit dug and fueled, the communal kettle cooking meat. At daybreak on December 10, “savage yelps” woke the men and they sprang up and grabbed their weapons. From the low entrance to the cabin they saw Indians, armed and painted, in the fringe of trees and brush bordering the camp. Joseph Miller, the one-time infantryman from Wilson Hunt’s party, was first to speak. “We are in trouble,” he said to Stuart. “These are some of the rascally Arapahays that robbed me last year.”

  The seven men slung their powder horns and ball pouches. McClellan, who had taken his rifle apart to clean it during the night, now fumbled to reassemble it and proposed to Stuart that they knock the chinking from the walls for loopholes to fire on the Indians. Stuart cautioned for the moment against bringing any weapons into play. “We must first hold a parley,” he said, and, accompanied by one of the Canadians, walked from the hut, rifle in hand, the other held palm-out to signify peaceful intent.

  The leader of the Indian band emerged from the brush thicket and shook hands with Stuart. Through signing, pointing, and what few words the engagé could translate, Stuart picked up their errand. The Arapahos were from a village several days to the east that had been attacked by Absaroka raiders who had made off with most of their horses and had taken some of their women captive. The warriors facing the Astorians’ camp were of a war party, armed with bows, arrows, war clubs, skinning knives, and a few ancient firearms, and had been sixteen days trailing the Crow. They had heard the gunshots of Stuart’s hunters, found the remains of the deer and buffalo killed, and followed the tracks to the white men’s camp.

  The Indians were hungry, and Stuart invited the “chief” and another warrior, seemingly a “lieutenant” in the band, into the hut to help themselves to the haunches of meat hanging from the roof-beams over the smoking fire pit. The chief and his aide needed no urging, and the venison and buffalo quarters quickly disappeared, being passed out the doorway to those waiting outside. There were twenty-three warriors in the Arapaho band and Irving wrote that “a scene of gormandizing commenced, of which few can have an idea, who have not witnessed the gastronomic powers of an Indian, after an interval of fasting.”

  The Astorians soon realized that the Arapahos were in no hurry to pursue the hated Crow raiders and for two days were content to raid the white man’s meat supply. They threw up what Irving called “breastworks,” into which they “retired at a tolerably early hour, and slept like overfed hounds” while the chief and his lieutenant stayed in the hut, getting up two or three times at night to carve meat and eat. Irving maintained that it was Stuart’s policy to overfeed his rapacious hut-guests and keep the chief and his aide as unknowing “captives” to ensure the “good conduct” of those outside.

  At last, on the third day since their encounter, the Arapaho party prepared to leave. They had a six-day journey, the chief said, before they would find the Absarokas, and since they would be traveling through country lean of game asked for provisions for the journey. Stuart complied, noting in his diary that they “departed peaceably about 10 A.M. carrying with them a great proportion of our best meat.” The chief also requested powder and ball but, the Astorian wrote, “a peremptory refusal soon convinced them that all demands of that nature were unavailing and they laughingly relinquished their entreaties.”

  (Irving’s story had the chief saying, “We are poor now, and are obliged to go on foot, but we shall soon come back laden with booty, and all mounted on horseback, with scalps hanging from our bridles. We will give each of you a horse to keep you from being tired on your journey.” To this Stuart replied, “Well, when you bring the horses, you shall have the ammunition, but not before.” The author does not explain how the Arapaho was able to convey all this in such courtly language, nor, apparently, does he think it strange that Stuart, with six men in his command, would speak so rudely to a chief with twenty-two well-armed warriors behind him.)

  They were relieved to be rid of the Arapahos but knew their meat-hungry guests would return and so held a council. They were in a vise, caught between freebooters and freeloaders, the Crow within a six-day ride on stolen Arapaho ponies, the Arapahos bound to come again, probably with more people from their village and this time probably not amused to be refused ammunition. Stuart and his men agreed on their only course of action and he entered in his journal that “we determined to abandon our Chateau of Indolence” after dressing enough deer and buffalo skins “for Mogasins etc.” and “extricate ourselves out of the paws of our rascally neighbors by going a very considerable distance down the river.” He hoped to make their next cantonment on the Missouri River.

  On December 13 they set out in the crusted snow, their bony packhorse laden with as much frozen meat as it could carry, and managed to travel twenty-five to thirty miles a day. The country turned barren after the first few days; the horse had to be fed cottonwood bark and willow twigs, and finding fuel for their fires required tedious work. Footsore from breaking through miles of frozen ground, Stuart early on noted that they were so anxious to find new winter quarters that they were willing to face hostile Indians and “rather than die on the march, fall valiently on the field of Mars.”

  On the thirty-first they set up their second winter quarters on the North Platte River in far eastern Wyoming in a grove of big cottonwoods and devoted the early days of 1813 “solely to the gratification of our appetites.” Buffalo were so plentiful that seven were killed in one day, and the Astorians “destroyed an immoderate quantity” of hump meat and tongue. Stuart also described exhausting the party’s tobacco supply, “but in commemoration of the new year we cut up as a substitute and smoked Mr. Miller’s Tobacco Pouch.”

  They completed their cabin on January 6, dug their fire pit, laid in the meat as they had six weeks before, and felled two trees to hollow for a trip down the river in the spring.

  The two months they spent in their cabin passed uneventfully. They were troglodytes but they had plenty to eat, plenty of work, and no Indian visitors.

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  On March 8, with the river running free of ice, the Astorians launched their rough canoes. Two men were left behind to follow the Platte bank with the packhorse while the canoe experiment got underway. After only a few miles of labored travel it became clear that boat travel, at least on this segment of the Platte, was impo
ssible. The river ran so shallow, was laced with so many sandbars, sinuous, sandy channels, fallen trees, “sawyers,” and boulders that the canoes had to be dragged downstream as often as floated. They were soon given up and after a camp to wait out a sudden reversal of weather—a terrible wind that froze any foot progress—the party resumed its march on the twentieth, following the river as it wound a mile wide and knee-deep east by northeast across the undulant prairie. The nights remained bitter and they shivered at their bivouac fires, but buffalo, wild geese, ducks, and grouse abounded. The flatlands, sparse of trees even at the riverbanks, grew rich in grass and the lovable horse fattened on it. The grass was of a variety the Hunt veterans recognized as being native to a region close to the bottoms of the Missouri. As well, some of the driftwood gathered for their fires bore ax marks, another tantalizing clue that they were nearing the white man’s habitat. “Thus they went on,” Irving wrote, “like sailors at sea, who perceive in every floating weed and wandering bird, harbingers of the wished-for land.”

  Toward the end of March they passed through three deserted hunting camps, Pawnee or Oto, it was guessed, littered with buffalo skulls, bones, and forlorn, hide-denuded tepee poles. A day or two later they discovered a hut in the midst of another Indian camp in which three old women were waiting to die. “It is a common practice with the Pawnees, and probably with other roving tribes,” Irving said, “when departing on a distant expedition, which will not admit any encumbrance or delay, to leave their aged and infirm with a supply of provisions sufficient for a temporary subsistence. When this is exhausted, they must perish.”

  Stuart made gifts of buffalo meat to the women, but they were so terror-stricken at the sight of the white men that no information could be gleaned from them, and they had to continue overland another day before coming upon the first landmark that gave them their bearings. This was an enormous island on the Wood River near its junction with the Platte, its features recognized by the Hunt veterans as a mere 150 miles from the Missouri. Soon after this comforting sighting, the Astorians encountered a solitary Oto hunter on the riverbank and the man greeted them warmly and escorted them to his Platte-side village. There they found two white men, the first they had seen since plunging into the wilderness nearly ten months past. The men, François Derouin and Jean Baptiste Antoine Roi, were trappers and Indian traders out of Saint Louis and they were brimming with news and had an audience voracious for it. From the traders Stuart and the others learned of the war with Britain, now a year old and begun before they had pushed off the banks of the Columbia to begin their wilderness sepulture.